Abstract

The present article reviews medical literature in the field of perioperative medicine in Greece and presents statistics about the Greek e-journal of Perioperative Medicine during from 2003 up to 1st issue of 2016.

INTRODUCTION

Presenting clinical and scientific information in a variety of formats for communicating medical information to different audiences remains the key of medical writing. Today, medical writing industry is on an upwards growth path.

Greece is in 24th place, among 235 countries, in SJR ranking in publication of medical articles1 (Image 1); yet Greek medical writing industry seems to be still in its youth. Several problems empower this claim; like e.g. the luck of a national database (like e.g. Pubmed, medInd, KoreaMed, etc); the large (in most cases) interval time from submission to publication, etc.

In the field of anesthesia, intensive care, emergency and perioperative medicine, there are only three medical journals- Acta Anesthesiologica Hellenica, published by the Hellenic society of Anesthesiology, Subjects of anesthesiology and intensive care and The Greek electronic journal of Perioperative Medicine, published by the Society of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care of Northern Greece. Lunched in 1966 Acta Anethesiologica Hellenica is oldest representative. It is an open accessed in-print journal with limited numbers of articles being available from 2014 also in form of digital archive (via the publisher’s website). For 2016, the editors have announced the transition of the journal to electronic form. Subjects of Anesthesiology and Intensive Care includes only invited articles-reviews for topic-dedicated issues. First published in 1990, it also follows printed format with digital archiving of the published articles in the Society’s website. The last available issue was released in 2014.

Image 1. Snapshot of country ranking as presented in SJR website. (http://tinyurl.com/htev9rc)

The Greek ej Periop Med., represents (till 2016) the only pure electronic representative. First published in 2003, as an attempt to fill the gap of a national electronic journal in the field, it now continues its track through “network world”.

Taken from a search in the SJR base , the number of articles in the 3 fields of Gr ej Periop Med interest is seen in Table 1.

Table 1. Published documents in Country search “Greek” per subject area1.

Year

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

Emergency medicine

9

14

20

31

44

59

59

44

65

55

48

49

Critical Care

37

49

80

71

90

82

70

93

75

93

70

83

Anesthesiology and Pain medicine

28

29

37

45

65

62

74

54

67

45

47

72

Up to now, the Gr ej Periop Med journal published mainly original articles, reviews and case reports (Figure 1). Original articles include experimental and observational trials, mainly cohort, case series and surveys studies. Till now, no systemic review or meta-analysis is presented in the journal’s website.

Figure 1. Distribution of paper per year (including 1st issue of 2016).

Yet, others forms of published documents (e.g. images, etc) are under evaluation for the future.

International collaboration was generally small, considering the fact that up to 2014, the journal was targeting only national audience (Figure 2, Table 2).

Figure 2. International collaboration in published papers (including 1st issue of 2016)

Table 2. References per document (mean) and percentage of in international collaboration.

Year

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

Ref/Doc

16,6

37,3

30,8

34,1

32,8

73,2

34,7

International collaboration %

10

10

30

16,7

14,3

0

0

International collaboration % in medical articles published from Greece1

28,3

27,9

28,9

29,1

32,4

32,2

32,8

Year

2010

2011

2012

2013

2014

2015

2016

Ref/Doc

46,7

22,3

30,4

38,4

26,8

30,4

20

International collaboration %

0

0

0

0

14,3

8,3

33,3

International collaboration % in medical articles published from Greece1

33,2

34,9

40,9

43,1

46,7

NA

NA

Reference/document are 34,1 (range 20-73.2), still small considering the overall contribution to Greek-origin medical articles1.

Other interesting facts about the journal are the used Key words. In 15 published issues (2003-2015), and a total 114 articles, 429 Key words were recorded (responding to 99 articles, 15 documents did not use any Key words). The majority of them is included in Medical Subjects Heading (MeSH) Database2,3, revealing an attempt to keep high standards from “day one” (Table 3, Figure 3).

Table 3. Distribution or different keywords per year and per article.

Year

Words/yr

Words/yr/article

Not in MeSH

2003

51

5,1

10

2004

26

2,6

0

2005

32

3,2

1

2006

24

4

3

2007

36

5,14

2

2008

41

4,56

3

2009

55

4,23

0

2010

30

3,75

0

2011

26

4,33

2

2012

25

4,17

1

2013

32

4,57

0

2014

23

3,83

1

2015

30

3

3

Figure 3. Percentage of Keywords not included in MesH per year of publication

Mention of the means (software) of statistical analysis of the articles was also made. Considering the fact that every tool-software has its drawback, this minor yet important note in the article text (when applicable) is essential. Results from archives of Gr ej Periop Med. shows that even though the majority of the articles do mention the software used for the statistical analysis, more steps towards this goal remain (Figure 4).

Overall, visibility of the journal for 2015 and 2016 (1st issue) is presented in Image 2.

Image 2. Visitors of the journal’s website during 2015 and 2016 (till 010/3/2016)

Table 4. Journal’s website statistics for the year 2014, 2015 and the first 2 months of 2016.

Year

2014

2015

2016

Views

2977

8598

2608

Visitor

645

3475

1228

View / visitor

4,62

2,47

2,12

The visibility of the journal since its first modification to target international audit in 2014 seems to pay off.

Bibliographic information about the journal are available in the journal’s website, thus it was omitted from this article. “Impact factor” mention, self-citation and citation analysis are under investigation for future presentation.